In 1911 the Brooklyn published a caricature of Russell and beneath it this question: "If Pastor Russell can get a dollar a pound for miracle wheat, what could he have got for miracle stocks and bonds as a director in the old Union Bank?" Russell sued the for libel. He sold what he called "miracle wheat" at sixty dollars a bushel to credulous farmers, the fraud being eventually stopped by the federal authorities, who made him refund the money (Leslie Rumble,, 2:1,352). He was an expert, too, at making money by investments in mines and real estate, and by selling his books. By the time he was thirty he had sold out the chain for 250,000 dollars, which in the 1880s was equivalent to more than a million dollars today" (Marley Cole,, 73). Before he was thirty years old he had expanded his father's clothing store in Alleghany, Pennsylvania and rapidly established four more. His followers write: "Russell must have had a rare capacity for business. Nor did Russell lead a saintly life such as we might expect of the founder of a religious sect. Russell was never a scholar in the accepted sense of the word. He wrote on the Bible, but every acknowledged Scripture scholar in the universities of the world today will agree that Russell's explanations are for the most part quite contrary to the obvious meaning of the words of the Bible. Handed a Greek New Testament, he was forced to admit that he did not know even the Greek alphabet. Under oath in court at Hamilton, Ontario, Canada in 1913 he declared in support of his claims to be an expert Scripture scholar that he knew Greek. Russell was not a Scripture scholar, learned in the Greek language. Aged twenty, he began preaching "the good news" with "no hell." He assumed the title "Pastor Russell" in 1879 when he was founding his new religion. Even as an atheist he could not leave the Bible alone. He had been obsessed by the thought of the horror of hell. At the age of seventeen he tried to convert an atheist but lost his own faith. He became an earnest worker in the Congregational Church. Russell was born in 1852 of Scottish and Irish descent. The Jehovah's Witnesses are a sect founded in 1879 by Charles Taze Russell, a Pittsburgh draper.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |